That night Grover walked with Sudie down Edgemont as streetlights buzzed and flickered on. Their father had called and said that he’d meet them at Jessie’s. It had turned much colder that afternoon. Grover and Sudie wore sweaters that smelled like the cedar chest. For the first time this fall, Grover had had to get his and his sister’s sweaters out of the chest in the upstairs hallway. He’d always loved the dark chest that had first belonged to their grandmother’s grandmother and had been protecting Johnston sweaters from moths for generations. Its bright smell was old and safe. As he’d dug through the folded sweaters, he stopped. Last Easter, like she had every Easter, their mother had carefully folded the family’s sweaters and put them away. He remembered walking past her as she sat there, setting sweaters into the chest. At the time he hadn’t thought a thing about it. But now he knelt beside the chest, stroking the sweaters, holding them to his face, breathing in their bright cedar smell.
As Grover and Sudie walked down the street, leaves blew along the sidewalk, making a dry scrambling sound. In the distance dogs gave test barks to see if other dogs were out there. Grover’d always liked fall with its cold and its early dark. He liked seeing into the lighted rooms of neighbors’ houses. He liked watching them cook or sit down to supper or watch TV together. He wondered if his neighbors knew what they had. How quick they could lose it. How in one millisecond it could all be gone.
Gone. The word couldn’t have sounded more like itself. Not there anymore boiled down to a single syllable, a solitary word. Gone. A word Grover had felt in his bones ever since that late afternoon in April when she hadn’t come back from her walk. Biscuit had shown up, his broken leash trailing behind. Their father had been on the phone to Videolife, when they’d heard sirens.
Grover and Sudie walked up Jessie’s stone walk, lined by leaf-shaped lights. Jessie lived in a small old Spanish stucco house with an arched front porch, a red tiled roof and big wavy glass windows that shimmered tonight with candlelight from inside. His yard stayed neat: the grass mowed, the shrubs trimmed, the beds mulched. Still, he wasn’t like some of the neighbors who Grover’s father called Yard Nazis—neighbors, most of them old with not much else to do except watch over their yards, swooping down on kids if they set foot on their lawns.
They found Jessie in the kitchen, turning over pieces of chicken sizzling in a frying pan. Without his big hat, he looked smaller. He’d tied his long gray hair back in a ponytail, and wore an apron that had printed in big bold letters across it, The South Shall Rise Again, and under the words was a drawing of a plateful of biscuits. Jessie already had several golden brown pieces of chicken draining on a paper towel on the counter.
“Daddy said he’d meet us here,” Sudie said.
Tippy and Merlin, Jessie’s two cats, rubbed against their legs. Tippy was strictly an indoor cat. Merlin spent the day outside but came in at night. Merlin liked to slip into neighbors’ houses when they weren’t looking. He’d tried slipping into Grover’s house but stopped after Biscuit had chased him out a few times.
“If y’all will set the table and fill the tea glasses,” Jessie said, checking the rice in a pot on the stove.
Grover and Sudie went to work, knowing which drawer held the silverware, which cabinets held the plates and glasses. Jessie and their parents had been friends so long that he felt like one of the family. They’d always eaten at Jessie’s on Saturday nights. Over the past six months, they’d eaten even more at Jessie’s, at least Grover and Sudie had.
Grover’d gotten down the plates and filled the tea glasses and Sudie’d set out the silverware and napkins, when their father walked in. He had on his tweed coat and a loosened tie. His face was dark with evening stubble, and he frowned to himself. He bent down and absentmindedly petted the cats.
“Help yourself,” Jessie said, nodding to the refrigerator.
Their father took a brown bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and opened it with the First Baptist of Asheville Church church key magnet on the side of the refrigerator.
“Daddy, Grover’s making his best weaving yet,” Sudie said.
“Another amazing one,” said Jessie, who stopped by Grover’s workshop now and then. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen anything quite like Grover’s weavings.”
Their father smiled vacantly as he pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. He sipped his beer, then set the bottle down and looked at it. He’d always had circles under his eyes, but they’d become almost black, like all his worries had pooled there.
“How are things at work?” Jessie asked, lifting the lid on the pot of rice, then replacing it.
Their father looked up. “Hmm?”
“How are things at the Old Kentucky Home?” Jessie asked. That was the name of the Wolfe house, the boardinghouse that Thomas Wolfe’s mother had run and where Wolfe had lived some as a boy. Wolfe had divided his time between his father’s house and his mother’s boardinghouse a few blocks away.
“I met with the county manager last week,” their father said, taking a sip of beer. “She says that with the economy the way it is, they have to make cuts where they can, and that they can’t cut schools or essential services.”
“Essential services?” Sudie asked.
“Like the fire department or the garbage pickup,” Grover said.
“The Thomas Wolfe house is an essential service!” Sudie said.
“I’d like to think so,” their father said, smiling that vacant smile again. “But the county manager said if we can’t get attendance up by the end of the year, they’ll have to cut our budget in half.”
“In half?” Jessie asked.
“I’ll have to lay off staff, and if I lay off staff, we’ll have to cut back hours, and if we cut back hours, we’ll have even fewer visitors and pretty soon they won’t just be cutting our budget, they’ll be closing us down.” He took another swig of his beer. “And I, along with a lot of other folks, will be out of a job.”
“It won’t come to that,” Jessie said.
“Delbert Lunsford has been talking to the other commissioners about replacing me.”
“Nobody listens to him,” Jessie said.
“Somebody must,” their father said. “He manages to get elected every couple of years.”
The upstairs of the Wolfe house had burned several years ago. Somebody, they never found out who, had thrown a burning rag through an upstairs window in the middle of the night. Grover’d been too young to remember the fire, but he did remember the big blue tarp that stayed draped over the burned roof for years. Delbert Lunsford, a longtime commissioner and a realtor, had had it in for their father ever since he’d organized opposition to Lunsford’s idea to bulldoze the burned house and sell the land to a hotel chain.
Instead of being bulldozed, the house had been restored with money their father had raised over several years. Before the fire the house had been a plain, ugly, run-down old white house. Grover’d seen pictures. The restoration, which came some years after the fire, brought new life to the house. His father had worked hard to bring the house back to how it first looked. Outside, it had been painted bright yellow, and inside, all the furniture, all the walls, all the floors had been restored to their new old selves. Their mother liked to say it was a reincarnation. Still with the house closed so long, attendance had never recovered.
Jessie served everyone’s plates in the kitchen. The four of them sat down to eat. Jessie reached for Grover’s and Sudie’s hands. And their father took their hands too. Everyone bowed their heads except Grover.
“Lord,” Jessie said, bowing his head, “we thank you for this sustenance. Amen.”
Grover liked Jessie’s blessings—short and sweet. Not like Aunt Paula, their father’s sister. Her blessings went on so long that food would have to be taken back into the kitchen to be reheated. But it had been good to have Aunt Paula around for their mother’s funeral, breaking up the weepy silence of all the red-eyed mourners with her loud sobbing, her swooning and swaying over the coffin and her crying out for Jesus to welcome her precious sister-in-law into His sweet embrace.
They’d been eating a while, and Jessie had their father cracking up with a story about a wealthy widow who was twenty years older and whose yard he’d landscaped for years. The other day she’d said her house was too big to be alone in and asked Jessie if he’d like to “shack up” with her.
Their father laughed. “ ‘Shack up’?”
“Her very words,” Jessie said, raising his hand like he was taking an oath.
“And what’d you say?” their father asked.
“I said I appreciated the offer but that I was looking for more of a commitment.”
Their father laughed again. Grover’d always liked eating at Jessie’s. Since their mother died, he’d liked it even more. Jessie could always make their father laugh.
“Someone put stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said.
Stunned at his sister’s timing, Grover glared at her across the table.
What? she silently mouthed.
“I haven’t seen any stakes,” Jessie said.
“Well, they’re not there now,” Sudie said.
Grover let his head drop to his chest.
“I wonder if he’s finally selling?” their father said, setting down a drumstick and wiping his fingers with his napkin.
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Jessie said. “I’ve heard his daughter might be pressing him for the money. She has two kids going to college.”
“With the price of land in Asheville these days,” their father said, taking a swig from his beer, “it’s got to be worth at least a hundred thousand.”
“I’d say twice that,” Jessie said.
“Wait a minute,” Grover said. “Somebody owns the Bamboo Forest?” In all the years he’d worked in the Bamboo Forest, never had it occurred to him that anyone might own it. How could anybody own the Bamboo Forest? It was like someone owning the sky or the clouds or the sun. Even today when he’d seen those stakes, it hadn’t registered that anyone might own the Bamboo Forest.
“Maybe he’s just having the property reappraised,” Jessie said.
“Lunsford,” Jessie said.
“The commissioner?” Grover asked, looking at their father.
“He owns a lot of land around Asheville,” their father said.
“He can’t sell the Bamboo Forest,” Grover said, sounding panicked.
“He owns it,” their father said. “He can do whatever he wants with it.”
Grover watched their father sip his beer. “Is that all you have to say?” His voice trembled. “Is that all you have to say about the most important place in our neighborhood?!”
“Whoa there, Son,” their father said, holding up his hands. “I didn’t mean to shortchange your ‘Bamboo Forest.’ ” He gave Jessie an amused look.
“You always make the Bamboo Forest sound silly,” Grover said.
His father scraped at the label on his beer bottle.
“Anybody like another one?” Jessie said, passing the basket of biscuits to Sudie.
“The thing is,” his father said, looking up at Grover, “you’re getting too old to spend so much time down there, doing those little … art projects.”
There it was, what his father had been waiting to say to him in all the months since their mother had died.
“They’re not little art projects,” Grover said. “They’re my work!”
“Work?” their father said.
“How about some pie and coffee, Walt?” Jessie said.
“If you spent half the time on your studies that you spend fiddling around in that patch of bamboo,” his father said, “you’d be a straight-A student. Like your sister.”
“Daddy.” Sudie shook her head at their father.
“It’s true,” their father said. “Grover’s a smart boy.…”
“Not the way you want me to be,” Grover said, his heart pounding.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve already taken away my afternoons in the Bamboo Forest!” Grover said. “The one thing I look forward to during the day! What else do you want from me?”
“I want you to grow up,” his father said. “It’s time you learn you can’t go running off to the bamboo whenever life gets hard.”
“But it’s okay for you to run off to the Wolfe house?!”
“Grover, I have a lot of people counting on me.”
“What about Sudie and me?” Grover said. “We count on you too!”
His father pushed himself up from the table. “I work my fingers to the bone, supporting you and your sister,” he said quietly. “You think I like working late? You think I like working on weekends?” His voice rose.
“Walt,” Jessie said.
“With your mother gone, my job is all we have! If it goes away, who’s going to make a living for us? Can you tell me that, Grover? Who’s going to pay the bills?”
“Walt,” Jessie said, standing up and putting his hand on their father’s shoulder and whispering. “He’s just a boy.”
Their father kept his eyes on Grover, but as he did, the anger seemed to drain out of them.
“How about some pie and coffee?” Jessie said again.
Their father sighed and sat back down.
“Grover, why don’t you help me make the coffee?” Jessie said.
Grover stood shakily and walked with Jessie into the kitchen, while Sudie cleared the table.
“And, Walt,” Jessie said over his shoulder, “I’ve got a box of kindling outside the back door and there’s a pile of seasoned wood. It’ll be our first fire of the fall.”
Their father stared at the beer bottle in his hands. After a few moments he got up and went outside. They could hear him out back picking through the wood. The one thing their father loved about as much as he loved Thomas Wolfe was making fires.
“He’s not himself these days,” Jessie said in a low voice.
Grover measured out the coffee into the coffeemaker, his hand trembling so much he spilled coffee all over the counter. He started to clean it up.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jessie said as he finished measuring the coffee.
“Lately he’s gotten so uptight about me going out to the Bamboo Forest,” Grover said, keeping his voice low. “And he’s on me all the time now about my grades. You’d think I was flunking.”
“It’s not you he’s upset about,” Jessie said.
“If your mama was alive she’d know how to make him feel better. He misses her.”
“Who doesn’t?” Grover snapped. But he knew Jessie was right. Their mother had kept their father’s spirits up after the Wolfe house burned, during the long hard years when it looked like it might never reopen. He’d worked even longer hours than he worked now and traveled to Raleigh sometimes two or three times a week to raise money.
After the coffee was made and dinner dishes left to soak in the sink, they carried their pie and their father’s coffee into the den. Their father, looking more like his old self, shifted the wood with a poker in the roaring fire he had going. He set the poker by the fireplace, making a metal rattle.
Sudie handed him his piece of pie. “Here you go, Daddy.”
Their father sat on the couch, and Grover set his father’s mug of coffee, which he always took black, on the coffee table in front of him.
“Thanks,” their father said quietly and looked up. Grover saw the old softness in his father’s face and the new lines in his forehead that had appeared in the last six months. He remembered how once every week or two, Jessie would come over to stay with Grover and Sudie, while their parents went out to supper alone. He remembered how his father would always be in a good mood on those nights, laughing and joking with Sudie and him. He remembered how his mother would walk into the living room, wearing one of her nice dresses and a pair of her glittery earrings, and his father’s eyes would light up as if seeing her for the first time.
They’d finished their pie. Jessie and Grover were playing chess on the floor by the fire, and their father was sitting on the couch, sipping his coffee with Sudie beside him, when there was a knock at the front door. Sudie ran to the door and led a woman back to the den. Dressed in green hospital scrubs, she had a wide face sprinkled with freckles, deep green eyes and a smile that reminded Grover of Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, one of the few DVDs they owned.
“I hope I’m not interruptin’ your supper,” she said.
“Leila,” Jessie said. “Have you met Walt Johnston?”
“Don’t get up,” she said.
Their father stood anyway. “I meant to get over and welcome y’all to the neighborhood before now,” he said. As soon as you started thinking their father didn’t notice anything, like new neighbors for instance, he up and did.
“And this is Sudie and Grover,” Jessie said.
“You’re the boy Clay met over in the canebrake,” she said. “He says you’re quite the artist. I didn’t mean to interrupt y’all’s game,” she said, glancing at the chessboard. “I told Emma Lee when I got home from work this evening I’d help her put together a bookshelf we bought. Now I can’t find my Phillips. Must’ve lost it in the move.”
Jessie went to the back of the house to get a screwdriver from his toolbox, leaving the woman and Grover’s father standing there.
“Your daughter’s a reader?” their father asked.
“Emma Lee was born reading,” she said.
So that was the name of the girl who sat on the steps all the time. Emma Lee.
“Reading is a rare ability in kids these days,” their father said. Grover had never been all that great a reader. When he was nine years old, he fell off his bike, hit his head and got a concussion. Grover remembered sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, trying to read Highlights magazine. He could read the individual words but they didn’t add up. Lately Grover had struggled with reading like he was walking around with a concussion; the words didn’t add up. In fact almost everything that he did and everything he felt these days didn’t add up.
“Jessie tells me you manage the Thomas Wolfe house,” the woman said.
“He’s the director,” Sudie said.
“I read Look Homeward, Angel when I was in college,” the woman said. “But tried picking it up again a couple of years ago and couldn’t get through it.”
“I get that a lot,” their father said. Sometimes he sounded like he’d written the book himself.
“Then I don’t feel so dense,” she said.
“It’s Wolfe who’s dense,” their father said. “At least his sentences can be.” He smiled.
“Emma Lee’s read about everything the man ever wrote.”
“If y’all come by sometime I’d be happy to give you a personal tour,” their father said. Grover noticed their father’s Southern accent got stronger talking to this woman, like it did whenever he talked to a repairman or a gas station attendant or anybody who had a thick accent.
“I went through the Wolfe house years ago,” Leila said. “Before it burned.”
“You need to go through again,” Sudie said.
“You wouldn’t believe the place now,” their father said.
“ ‘A phoenix risen from the ashes,’ ” Sudie said, quoting what their father had said in the Asheville Citizen-Times about the renovation.
“Emma Lee would love a tour,” Leila said. “So would I.”
“Great,” their father said, sounding livelier than Grover could remember him sounding in a long time. It gave him an uneasy feeling.
“You work at St. Joseph’s?” their father said, nodding at the woman’s scrubs.
“I’m an obstetrics nurse,” she said.
“She helps deliver babies,” Sudie whispered to Grover.
“I know what it means,” Grover whispered back impatiently.
“Both our kids were born at St. Joseph’s,” their father said.
Jessie came back in with a screwdriver, and the rest of the chocolate pie wrapped in tinfoil.
“I can’t take your pie,” the woman said. The long flat way she said “pie” was like a sentence all by itself.
“There’s plenty more where that came from,” Jessie said. “Good luck with the shelf. You need any help?”
“I’m pretty handy,” the woman said.
“Is the house working out okay, Leila?” Jessie asked. “I know that electric baseboard isn’t the best heat.”
“The house is fine, Jessie. We’re plenty warm. After a lifetime of splitting and toting wood for Nanna’s woodstove, I’m happy to come home from work and just turn a knob.”
One of Jessie’s cats had come up and was rubbing against her leg. “Merlin’s been visiting us pretty regularly.” She bent down and petted him. “He likes to sit in the front window and watch the birds.” She looked up at Jessie. “I feed him a little something every now and then.”
“If he ever gets to be a pest,” Jessie said, “toss him out.”
“Emma Lee and Clay like him visiting too,” she said. “My mother has always had dogs. She’s never liked cats. She doesn’t trust them.”
After the woman left, their father and Sudie settled back on the couch, and Grover and Jessie went back to their game in front of the fire.
“Nice woman,” their father said, getting up and putting another log on the fire. Grover could feel how his father’s mood had improved.
“They’ve been through a lot,” Jessie said, not taking his eyes off the board. “Lost her husband in Iraq.”
Their father shook his head. “It’s everywhere.”
Grover knew Sudie was remembering what Clay had said. My daddy was a surveyor. He looked at his own father, who stared at the fire. Death, Grover had figured out, wasn’t really the funeral or the headstone or everybody saying how sorry they were. Death was a long, painful correction in thinking.
That night Grover couldn’t sleep. He’d been lying in bed with his door open, listening to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass on his iPod. It had been his mother’s favorite album. Grover listened to it almost every night. He liked the gentle, dreamy music. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he’d find himself standing on the edge of some dark pool, looking down with the music echoing all around him. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he’d catch a glimpse of his mother’s face, like a faint moon, rising out of the deep, dark water.
The music usually helped him fall asleep. But on this night even George Harrison couldn’t help. The house was quiet when he slipped out and walked over to the Bamboo Forest. He took a flashlight but the moon was so bright he didn’t need it. He walked to his workshop and sat on an old tree stump in the middle of the clearing, listening to the night breeze rattle the bamboo leaves. A screech owl tittered nearby and in the distance a train whistle blew. Grover patted the old stump. It was hard to believe that anyone would or even could sell this place. How long did he have? How long before bulldozers mowed down the Bamboo Forest? He’d seen it happen in plenty of other places around town. One day there’d be grass and trees and maybe even a creek. The next day there’d be nothing but ragged roots and ground so torn up and red that it looked like it was bleeding.
Grover thought about his father saying he was too old to be doing those little art projects. Maybe he was. He had to admit that when he thought about it, it was pretty silly for a twelve-year-old boy to sit around, trying to weave grass and leaves and sticks together. He saw something—a small ghost drifting toward him. His heart began to pound. But before the apparition reached Grover, Biscuit came trotting up ahead of it. The ghost turned out to be Sudie in her robe.
“I heard you get up,” she said, sitting beside him on the stump.
Biscuit gave a little yip and disappeared into the bamboo. He’d probably smelled a rabbit.
“Daddy didn’t mean all that tonight,” Sudie said.
“He meant it, all right,” Grover said. “And maybe I am wasting my time.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sudie said.
“Is stupid your favorite word these days?”
“I can’t help it if a lot of things are stupid lately,” she said.
They sat on the stump a minute, listening to the screech owl. Biscuit gave another little bark as they heard him scamper around in the bamboo.
“Besides,” Sudie said, “you couldn’t stop making things if you tried.”
Grover expected this was true. He made things in spite of himself. Oftentimes he’d be sitting around and find himself in the middle of weaving grasses or arranging rocks or stacking sticks. Things came together under his hands.
“Can we go back to the house?” Sudie said, standing up. She hugged herself, shivering. “I’m getting cold.”
“You go on back,” he said. “I’m not ready to.”
“Then I’m not going back either.” Sudie sat back on the stump, crossing her arms against the chilly night air. She pulled the little cylinder necklace out from under her pajama top and held it. The two of them sat there, listening to the bamboo rattle in the breeze. The screech owl had gone silent.
“Can we go back, please?” Sudie said.
“Okay, okay,” he said, getting up.
“Come on, Biscuit,” Sudie called, and after a minute, the little dog emerged from the bamboo and ran ahead of them. She took Grover’s hand.
Before, Grover would’ve pulled away. Before, he wouldn’t have been caught dead holding his little sister’s hand.